Who do you think (if anyone) is the successor of Sigmund Freud ?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by IIIIIIIIII, Sep 10, 2015.

  1. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    It's actually funny to notice that this instinct is the only one that cannot be removed from any existing species... From that we CAN'T be wrong =D
     
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  3. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Look, sometimes a cigar stuck in an unusual place is just... oh, right.

    Well I guess the word is presidential. Anyway. Carry on.
     
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  5. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Oh yeah? Pandas. Take that.
     
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  7. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    If Eros is fundamental then why not Thanatos ?
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Obviously not. Just within the clade of mammals, there at least three basic psychological templates.
    • Solitary species (e.g., tigers) have no social relationships. At best they ignore each other, at worst they fight in competition for food. They only form extremely brief relationships in order to mate and perpetuate the species, and the males immediately go away, leaving the females to take care of the young.
    • Herd-social species (e.g., cattle, and I have yet to find the proper scientific term for this) gather in large groups. They cooperate to defend against predators, and all of the adults protect all of the young. The most common herd-social species are grazers, and typically the leader is a female whose only job is to lead the herd to the next food supply when the last one has been eaten to the ground. There is no enforcement and individuals can and do wander off to find better pastures. They treat one another with courtesy, e.g., not knocking each other down to get to the best food, but social relationships are rudimentary and transitory.
    • Pack-social species (e.g. most of the Great Apes, notably Homo sapiens) have much more complex social relationships with hierarchies and assigned tasks, and may form lifelong pair-bonds--many species, such as eagles and wolves, take this much more seriously than humans. Packs may compete for scarce food sources, to the extent of fighting to the death.
    Clearly, just within one clade of animals, mammals, there are multiple psychological paradigms. When you start looking into the social customs of other clades such as insects, you'll find a bewildering assortment of psychological imperatives--even between two closely related species of wasps.
    You have naturally chosen two species with social instincts very similar to those of humans. Wolves are one of the few species who more-or-less voluntarily chose to form a multi-species pack with humans, each contributing its own strengths for the betterment of the hybrid community. (Not necessarily such a great bargain for the wolves, since they had to adapt to a lower-protein vegetable-intensive diet, resulting in dog brains becoming smaller to tolerate the lower protein content.)

    Many people still assume that there is only one species of chimpanzee, but in fact the "true" chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, is larger and more violent than the bonobo chimpanzee, Pan paniscus. Their social structures are considerably different, with the bonobos spending much of their time in sex orgies, while the other species engage in mortal combat. In the bad old days when the two species were unknowingly combined in zoos, the bonobos led miserable lives.
    And as is common with our species, his strength was intellectual rather than physical. He very quickly recognized the potential of the emerging technology of electronic communication, and harnessed it. Before the invention of radio, it was impossible for one person to speak to a group larger than about 1,000 individuals. With radio, he could speak to the entire population at once!
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Horses, zebras, coatimundis, prairie dogs, and so forth, don't seem to fit well into any of those.

    And cattle, at least dairy cattle in small herds, will form fairly complex social groups featuring long lasting social bonds and hierarchies - old style dairy farmers kept track of this, because if they did something like milk the cows in the wrong order, or put the wrong cows next to each other in the milking stalls, production suffered and hassles multiplied.

    Quite a few mammals will bond with people - not at the depth of a dog, but with noticeable attachment. That implies a social structure among themselves more than rudimentary.
     
  10. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Of course, Artificial Intelligence is artificial - i.e. it doesn't have to bear any real resemblance to human intelligence. A model that is "useful" in such a sense is not necessarily accurate.
     
  11. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Well sure, I'd like to kick lots of people's asses.
     
  12. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    And the British engineers put earplugs to avoid this audio-harassment as they used another kind of sound to sink ruthlessly every German U-Boat that were crazy enough to listen/believe the Hitler delusional radio emissions...

    Now that I'm thinking of it they copied the Killer Whale !! =D
     
  13. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    Then why don't you do it ?

    Funny enough, one of the most potent animals in the ocean do not use brute force in its complex social relationships even for mating. One could argue that they have a very different psyche than Wolves, Chimps or their near cousins the Dolphins which are known to be very social animals...
     
  14. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    109
    How was it already ? "All models are wrong, but some are useful" [=
     
  15. GeoffP Caput gerat lupinum Valued Senior Member

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    Well, there's the illegality of it all, really.

    I find that a more civilized approach is to just urinate in a circle around other people's desks.
     
  16. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    But then, how do you reach your food ? (having urinated between you and the target)...

    Us, Killer Whales, like it the following way :

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    or sometimes we need third party to play "Tailseal" .... :

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  17. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    Well... cattle in particular have been selected throughout the ages to be placid, stay where humans put them and wouldn't survive if suddenly replaced in a wild environment... Only few generations transform a fox in a dog.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I assume you meant wolf, not fox, since dogs and foxes are not members of the same genus. It was wolves who made the transition to dogs, but they are still the same species, just different subspecies: Canis lupus lupus and Canis lupus familiaris. The major physiological difference between a wolf and a dog is that dogs have smaller brains, an adaptation to the much lower-protein diet that we feed them.

    But there are considerable psychological adaptations. Adult dogs play, bark and wag their tails (behaviors that endear them to us), which only young wolves do. Dogs have a much weaker alpha instinct, which in domestication makes them happy to let a member of another species be pack leader, and in the wild results in much larger packs than wolves form.

    Many breeds of dogs have developed the ability to read human body language. Very few wolves can do that... or even want to.
     
  19. IIIIIIIIII Registered Senior Member

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    Nope, I meant "Fox". While foxes and dogs cannot interbreed and produce fertile offsprings, despite both belonging to the same Canidae family, an experiment very much like the one we all know about the dog was held in Russia on the Vulpes genus.

    You can find some useful info here : http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...tten-russian-experiment-in-fox-domestication/

    I once read about the experiment in Richard Dawkins litterature...

    The result is obviously a dog, which looks like a fox. Food for thoughts...
     

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